With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 2

by Unknown

[The skilled and popular novelist to whom we owe our present selection seems to have entertained for years a vivid wish to see the glory of the tropics, the achievement of which desire is put upon record in “At Last,” the work from which we quote. In his “Westward Ho” he had years before given a warmly-delineated imaginary picture of the tropics, but waited for years afterwards to see these scenes in their picturesque reality. He tells well the story of the tropical “High Woods.”]

And now we set ourselves to walk to the depot, where the government timber was being felled, and the real “High Woods” to be seen at last. Our path lay along the half-finished tramway, through the first cacao plantation I had ever seen, though, I am happy to say, not the last by many a one.

Imagine an orchard of nut-trees, with very large, long leaves. Each tree is trained to a single stem. Among them, especially near the path, grow plants of the common hot-house Datura, its long white flowers perfuming all the air. They have been planted as landmarks, to prevent the young cacao-trees being cut over when the weeds are cleared. Among them, too, at some twenty yards apart, are the stems of a tree looking much like an ash, save that it is inclined to throw out broad spurs like a ceiba. You look up and see that they are Bois immortelles, fifty or sixty feet high, one blaze of vermilion against the blue sky. Those who have stood under a Lombardy poplar in early spring and looked up at its buds and twigs showing like pink coral against the blue sky, and have felt the beauty of the sight, can imagine faintly—but only faintly—the beauty of these “madres de cacao,”—cacao mothers, as they call them here,—because their shade is supposed to shelter the cacao-trees, while the dew collected by their leaves keeps the ground below always damp.

I turned my dazzled eyes down again and looked into the delicious darkness under the bushes. The ground was brown with fallen leaves, or green with ferns; and here and there a slant ray of sunlight pierced through the shade, and flashed on the brown leaves, and on a gray stem, and on a crimson jewel which hung on the stem, and there, again, on a bright orange one; and as my eye became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the stems and larger boughs far away into the wood were dotted with pods, crimson, or yellow, or green, of the size and shape of a small hand closed with the fingers straight out. They were the cacao-pods, full of what are called at home cacao-nibs. And there lay a heap of them, looking like a heap of gay flowers; and by them sat their brown owner, picking them to pieces and laying the seeds to dry on a cloth. I went up and told him that I came from England, and never saw cacao before, though I had been eating and drinking it all my life; at which news he grinned amusement till his white teeth and eyeballs made a light in that dark place, and offered me a fresh broken pod, that I might taste the pink sour sweet pulp in which the rows of the nibs lie packed, a pulp which I found very pleasant and refreshing.

He dries his cacao-nibs in the sun, and, if he be a well-to-do and careful man, on a stage with wheels, which can be run into a little shed on the slightest shower of rain; picks them over and over, separating the better quality from the worse; and at last sends them down on mule-back to the sea, to be sold in London as Trinidad cocoa, or perhaps in Paris to the chocolate-makers, who convert them into chocolate, “Menier” or other, by mixing them with sugar and vanilla—both, possibly, from this very island. This latter fact once inspired an adventurous German with the thought that he could make chocolate in Trinidad just as well as in Paris. And (so goes the story) he succeeded; but the fair Creoles would not buy it. It could not be good; it could not be the real article, unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice to and fro from that centre of fashion, Paris. So the manufacture, which might have added greatly to the wealth of Trinidad, was given up, and the ladies of the island eat naught but French chocolate, costing, it is said, nearly four times as much as home-made chocolate need cost.

As we walked on through the trace (for the tramway here was still unfinished), one of my kind companions pointed out a little plant, which bears in the island the ominous name of the Brinvilliers. It is one of those deadly poisons too common in the bush, and too well known to the negro Obi-men and Obi-women. And as I looked at the insignificant weed, I wondered how the name of that wretched woman should have spread to this remote island, and have become famous enough to be applied to a plant. French negroes may have brought the name with them; but then arose another wonder. How were the terrible properties of the plant discovered? How eager and ingenious must the human mind be about the devil’s work, and what long practice—considering its usual slowness and dulness—must it have had at the said work, ever to have picked out this paltry thing among the thousand weeds of the forest as a tool for its jealousy and revenge! It may have taken ages to discover the Brinvilliers, and ages more to make its poison generally known. Why not? As the Spaniards say, “The devil knows many things, because he is old.” Surely this is one of the many facts which point towards some immensely ancient civilization in the tropics, and a civilization which may have had its ugly vices and have been destroyed thereby.

Now we left the cacao grove; and I was aware on each side of the trace of a wall of green, such as I had never seen before on earth, not even in my dreams,—strange colossal shapes towering up a hundred feet and more in height, which, alas! it was impossible to reach, for on either side of the trace were fifty yards of half-cleared ground, fallen logs, withes, huge stumps ten feet high, charred and crumbling, and among them and over them a wilderness of creepers and shrubs, and all the luxuriant young growth of the “rastrajo,” which springs up at once whenever the primeval forest is cleared,—all utterly impassable. These rastrajo forms, of course, were all new to me. I might have spent weeks in botanizing merely at them; but all I could remark, or cared to remark, there as in other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo towards growing enormous rounded leaves. How to get at the giants behind was the only question for one who for forty years had been longing for one peep at Flora’s fairy palace, and saw its portals open at last. There was a deep gully before us, where a gang of convicts was working at a wooden bridge for the tramway, amid the usual abysmal mud of the tropic wet season, and on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left of the trace. I hurried down it like any school-boy, dashing through mud and water, hopping from log to log, regardless of warnings and offers of help from good-natured negroes, who expected the respectable elderly “buccra” to come to grief, struggled perspiring up the other side of the gully, and then dashed away to the left, and stopped short, breathless with awe, in the primeval forest at last.

In the primeval forest, looking upon that upon which my teachers and masters, Humboldt, Spix, Martius, Schomburgk, Waterton, Bates, Wallace, Gosse, and the rest, had looked already, with far wiser eyes than mine, comprehending somewhat at least of its wonders, while I could only stare in ignorance. There was actually, then, such a sight to be seen on earth, and it was not less, but far more, wonderful than they had said.

My first feeling on entering the high woods was helplessness, confusion, awe, all but terror. One is afraid at first to venture in fifty yards. Without a compass, or the landmark of some opening to or from which he can look, a man must be lost in the first ten minutes, such a sameness is there in the infinite variety. That sameness and variety make it impossible to give any general sketch of the forest. Once inside “you cannot see the wood for the trees.” You can only wander on as far as you dare, letting each object impress itself on your mind as it may, and carrying away a confused recollection of innumerable perpendicular lines all straining upward, in fierce competition, towards the light-food far above; and next of a green cloud, or rather mist, which hovers round your head, and rises thickening to an unknown height. The upward lines are of every possible thickness, and of almost every possible hue; what leaves they bear, being for most part on the tips of the twigs, give a scattered, mist-like appearance to the under foliage.

For the first moment, therefore, the forest seems more open than an English wood. But try to walk through it, and ten steps undeceive you. Around your knees are probably Mamures, with creeping stems and fan-shaped leaves, something like those of a young cocoa-nut-palm. You try to brush through them, and are caught up instantly by a string or wire belonging to some other plant. You look up and round, and then you find that the air is full of wires,—that you are hung up in a net-work of fine branches belonging to half a dozen different sorts of young trees, and intertwined with as many different species of slender creepers. You thought at your first glance among the tree-stems that you were looking through open air; you find that you are looking through a labyrinth of wire rigging, and must use the cutlass right and left at every five steps.